In April I travelled to Grasmere with poet and football coach Steven Matthews to investigate the soundscape of locations that relate to the poetry and life of William Wordsworth. After spending an afternoon at Greenhead Gill recording the sounds of fast flowing water – the tumultuous brook of Wordsworth’s Michael, a pastoral poem (1800) – we headed to Hillard Park the home of Ambleside United to see their reserves host AFC Carlisle in the Westmorland Association Football League Division Three. As soon as we parked up on Under Loughrigg – the lane that runs along the course of the River Rothay as it heads South towards Windermere – we could hear the sounds of the game. We crossed the river and I stopped to listen to the shouts and commands of the players and coaches as they blended with the babble of the flowing water, the distant vibrations of air-traffic, occasional cars on the lane and birdsong. The sounds of the match are only audible as play moves towards us at the Northern end of the ground. The sound of the ball being struck is distinctive and cuts across the sound of the river:

Steven walked on and headed up the bank at the Northern edge of the pitch and I stopped again to listen. Further away from the river now the soundscape is less consistent with the flowing water just a light white noise. The shouts of the players counterpoint the calls of birds in the low shrubs and children playing on the other side of the park. The thud of the ball can be heard in more detail now and with less uniformity. The dull bird-scaring slap of the goalkeepers kick is joined by lighter sounds – headers and the occasional deft touch perhaps:

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Sound Diaries

In 2008 Felicity Ford and Paul Whitty set up a project with the aim of recording everyday life in sound – to resist the overwhelming tide of visual images of the everyday and to meet it with the abundant soundings of vending machines, luggage carousels, toasters, escalators, boilers, garden sheds, wheeled luggage. We followed the writer Georges Perec’s instruction to exhaust the subject, not to be satisfied with a cursory glance, not to be satisifed to have identified what you already know – what you have already heard – but to look again or in our case to listen, to keep listening, to listen long after it would probably have been more sensible to stop. That project was Sound Diaries.